Reading RPS's "Wot I Think" (http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/02/21/crysis-3-review-pc/) a gloves-off review of the game, I couldn't help but laugh. He came to the same conclusions I did. Crytek came to a fork in the road when they went from WarHead (open sandbox FPS) to the heavily consolised Crysis 2 (run down a scripted tunnel swearing). And having abandoned the platform that gave birth to them, Crytek continued on the same "linear mass-murder with swearing" route. Shame. Their concession to the PC is the ability to increase the graphics settings until your video card melts - never mind the reason that Crysis was so good, was it played as good as it looked - just make the new ones shiny eh?. Well, at least that's something.
Quote from: Rock, Paper, ShotgunIt has a lot of graphics
Quote“Shit **** pussy,†says the man. “System X Nano Alpha Ceph Mindcarrier,†says the other man. The stupidest games are so often the ones which take themselves most seriously, aren’t they? Crysis 3, a game about being a flightless Superman with lots of guns and a rapidly-depleting energy meter, takes itself very seriously indeed. Wearing its Modern Warfare influences on its nanofibre sleeve, it gangster-growls and buzzword-babbles without even an iota of self-awareness.
QuoteWarhead’s half-mad star {Psycho} now comes across as a chubby binman who’s in a **** because Arsenal just lost at home.
QuoteIt seems implausible now that this series’ origins were as a bunch of soldiers with cool armour galloping freely across a paradise island and playing frisbee with turtles: now it’s all wormholes and telepathy and ghosts in the shell and “shit **** pussy.â€
QuoteYou won’t be surprised by what’s around the corner, because you’ve already hidden behind a demolished bus, scanned the landscape and setup handy glowing triangles which identify exactly what’s around the next dozen corners.
I played the Crysis 3 Multiplayer free trial (BETA if you want to call it that) and I found that since Quake 3, they added
buckets of graphics and
truckloads of weapons, but deleted the fun. Having been burned by the recent "Aliens Colonial Marines" I won't be buying another dire console port any time soon. Already the multiplayer on ACM is struggling to find enough players for a deathmatch game.
Maybe I'm getting like the old geezer in BattleField Friends' "They ruined Battlefield (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzwQmUAJjoI)", but recent FPS releases, BF3 included, seem to be a race to the bottom. Will BF4 have less features than BF3? I imagine it will. It certainly won't have the feature set of BF2. The amount of DLC seems to be inversely proportional to the quality of the core games (as a rule).
Another example is "Need for Speed: Most Wanted". I actually enjoyed the game, although now I'm Number 1 "Most Wanted", there's little or no replay value. My point is, that your cars can be upgraded with 2 variants (Standard or Pro) of three types of Tyres, Nitro, Chassis, Body, Transmission. But that's it!
In "Need for Speed: Underground" released in 2003 (a decade ago) you could put neon under your car, change the windows, change paint colour, add decals (from a huge range) to any body panel, add spoilers, intakes, tyres, wheels, bumpers, trim, windows stickers, change the engine, add turbo, add nitros etc. etc. The game mechanic (pardon the pun) was far more advanced.
Most Wanted is a good game, BUT... it's basically a new map and cars for Burnout Paradise (a previous Criterion game) - even to the jumping through road-side billboards. There is no innovation there. In the past a game re-released with slightly different content was called an "expansion pack" (i.e. Carmageddon Splat Pack) and sold at a discounted price.
Are developers just lazy or has nobody shown them the earlier games and said "beat that!" ? Either way, Crytek has no excuse.
Yeah its such a shame to see them go this way, the first Crysis was a fantastic game. I'll give this one a run through still, as long as the mechanics are still fairly solid it'll do to kill a few hours, even if it isn't going to have the same creativity and freedom as the first. Just means I won't be playing through it more than once I guess.
I felt much the same with Dead Space 3. Its a really fun game to play, but they have completley removed the horror aspect in favour of action action action. Worth a run through, but didn't leave me on the edge of my seat like the first. That and they seemed to remove everything interesting from the story. Shame.
Couldn't agree more with respect to NFS Most Wanted. After hitting 1st, there's nothing to do except drive around getting chased by cops. :/
None of these new games are exactly bad, they're just massively under-achieving. "Could do better" as my school reports used to say!!